Challenges Today

Malthus' foreseeing

Malthus discovered the linkage between and agricultural production and the thriving society during the industrialization [49]. He then hypothesized technological improvements in food production to always lead to an increase in population to that degree, that society will face the challenge of feeding all – a statement that unravels to still be true. Today, we are able to (better or worse) feed humanity around the globe with close to 8 Mrd. individuals [20, 49]. This was able through fertilizers, pesticides, modern machinery and globalization, wich led to a tightly connected and hyper-efficient food supply around the world.

As amazing all this sounds, society is expected to increase to around 10 Mrd. in numbers till 2050 [49], which is going to be the major challenge of our generation [36, 47] and tightly linked to climate change [19, 22, 49]! We already know, that we will not be able to further increase the efficiency of the classic agriculture to the extend needed, hence, we have to find different approaches [55].  Additionally, agriculture as it is today is one of the main emitters of GHGs, causing climate change [20]. Therefore, our system of food production is kind of threatening itself.

Let us see, what might be at least partially a solution for securing our food supply in the future here.